Introducing The Workshop

"This is only the beginning of our open-source web development efforts."

Our team is grateful to the open-source community and their dedication to making the web a better place. Projects like Git, Homebrew, Node, jQuery, React and PostCSS are vital to us and enable us to build rich websites. Because we're dedicated to building the best web possible, we knew we also had a responsibility to share our tools. To do this, we're launching a new area of our website called The Workshop.

The Workshop is a centralized location of our best internal, open-source projects. As of today, that includes three repositories: Project Starter, Visor and Uplimiter.

Here's what you can expect to find out about each one.

Project Starter

Project Starter is the boilerplate we use when beginning a new project. This has gone through several iterations over its lifetime starting with Yeoman, Browserify and Gulp before moving to the current setup of Webpack, PostCSS and more. There are many open-source web starter kits with different focuses and strategies. Ours emphasizes performance, simplicity and scalability.

Visor

Visor is our first Craft CMS plugin. It presents a simple admin overlay to get to relevant areas of the Craft control panel. For instance, if you are on a blog entry on your website’s front-end, you can use Visor to take you to the edit screen or to the other posts within the “blog” channel. You can open Visor using a keyboard shortcut or by clicking the icon in the bottom corner of your browser when logged in. While we’ve provided icons and a base color scheme, Visor is easily customized so it fits in with the design of your site.

Uplimiter

Uplimiter is our latest Craft CMS plugin. On a handful of occasions, clients have requested certain user groups be limited to how large of a file they can upload. For instance, an “admin” should be able to upload files of any size while a different group with more restricted CMS access can upload files no larger than 1 MB. Craft doesn’t natively support this functionality, so we wrote a custom plugin to handle this. In Uplimiter’s settings, you can see all of the user groups and the maximum file size (in bytes) they can upload. This allows Craft users to easily set values on a group by group basis.

What's Next?

This is only the beginning of our open-source web development efforts, and we hope to include much more in the coming months. In true open-source fashion, we want to collaborate to make these projects better. If you find any of these valuable or have any questions or thoughts, consider opening a GitHub issue or submitting a pull request!